Armed to the teeth: Sierra Leonean rebel child soldiers near Freetown
Credit: IRIN | JEMBE REFUGEE CAMP, When relief workers set up Jembe refugee camp in Sierra Leone to house people fleeing from civil war in neighbouring Liberia, it never occurred to them that children would become the biggest headache.
In mid-August, a group of about 20 child soldiers organised a strike amongst the 7,000 people living in the camp near the eastern town of Kenema to demand bigger food rations. They barred camp officials from entering the settlement until the police intervened.
"They are a stigmatised lot, having carried out grievous atrocities while in battle. They tend to feel bad and react accordingly," one counsellor at the camp told IRIN. "Violence has become part of their lives. They find it extremely difficult to recognise authority since they had power over the civilian population in their previous lives."
Within the camp, the former child soldiers organise cockfights and continue their old looting habits. They steal anything that can be sold, including cooking utensils, clothing and bedding. Some have even sold all the basic items given to them by relief workers, including their food ration cards.
"One dismantled a door frame of the house he was living in and sold the pieces of wood. Another sold his bed," another relief worker at Jembe camp told IRIN. Relief workers suspect that the kids, who were used to taking drugs and alcohol when they were fighting in Liberia, use some of the money to purchase marijuana. It is readily available nearby.
As at mid-September 2003 there were 168 Liberian former child soldiers living in eight refugee camps in Sierra Leone. Some looked only nine or 10 years old, but when asked, none gave an age of less than 15.
Most had arrived in previous months as rebel advances in northwestern Liberia forced several groups of government soldiers to cross into Sierra Leone and hand in their weapons to the local security forces.
The relief workers, none of whom wished to be named, said they were an unruly lot almost beyond the scope of counselling. Having tasted the power that comes from wielding a gun, they were unwilling to be told what to do and often became violent.
"They sometimes come to my house at night and demand food and sex saying that they know I am not a virgin and that in the bush they slept at will with women even better than me," a female social worker at Jembe camp told IRIN. "I have decided to always wear trousers while in the camp because they are quite serious with their threats."
With limited facilities for education or skills training in the refugee camps, it is an uphill task to keep these young teenagers occupied and out of trouble. Camp officials said they were often forced to seek help from local police over serious cases of theft and fighting. In such cases the child soldiers often ended up in the district magistrate's court.
Counselling
A psychiatric counsellor with the Centre for Victims of Torture (CVT) in Jembe camp said it took a lot of negotiation to even persuade the children show up for counselling sessions.
CVT is currently handling between 15 to 20 child ex-combatants, identified by social workers as the most difficult cases to deal with.
"After painstaking negotiations they eventually come when they decide to," said the counsellor, who like most of those dealing with these problem kids, was unwilling to be quoted by name. "We handle them quite gently and are trying to bring them to a point where they can acknowledge what they did and deal with the guilt."
The centre had divided the children put down for counselling at Jembe into two groups of 10 with the aim of encouraging them to support each other and make sure that they turned up for counselling sessions.
"Apart from getting them involved in the counselling and planning of activities for themselves, we have recommended that they be referred to as child soldiers and not ex-combatants - a stronger term embedded with negative connotations," the counsellor said.
These children found life in the refugee camps frustrating. They had all sorts of unfulfilled expectations, made worse by the restrictions imposed on them.
Only a few of the camps had access to secondary schools.
Upon arrival in a refugee camp, the younger child soldiers were put under the wing of a "care giver." The older ones were housed together in groups of three or four.
Brown Yehi, 17, was found by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) at a transit camp for Liberian fighters who had decided to cross the border and abandon the war. He was sent to Jembe refugee camp in May, but told IRIN that he found life there "very difficult".
Like many of the child soldiers, he was frustrated at being unable to lay his hands on luxury items that could formerly be obtained by looting. "I can't get things that I like such as sneakers, good clothes," he said in a soft but confident voice.
He said he wanted to go to school and learn to be a better person. But he was temporarily banned from school for not having the proper shoes. Yehi, who was dressed in shorts and T-shirt, said he only had a pair of plastic flip-flop sandals which were banned in the classroom.
He said he had been press-ganged into the government army by soldiers who picked him up while he was on his way to school in Nimba County, north central Liberia, over two years ago.
He was then made to fight for former President Charles Taylor in Lofa County near the Sierra Leone border, until the region was completely overrun by rebels earlier this year.
But, suddenly turning from a tough fighter into a vulnerable child again, Yehi said he had a deep longing to see his mother who was still in Liberia.
Aged 16, Emmanuel Cooper, was already a veteran of bush warfare, having spent three years fighting with another pro-Taylor militia unit in Lofa County. But he felt life in the refugee camp was much better. "I can do things for myself now," Cooper said adding that in the bush he and his comrades could only do what they were ordered to do by the commanders.
"I was captured in Monrovia at my father's carpentry shop where I was learning carpentry. We were flown to Lofa county in a military helicopter and recruited into the force. I left them in July and came to Sierra Leone," he told IRIN.
Cooper said he was one of about 30 child soldiers in his unit, which was based in Foya Kamala near the Sierra Leone border. Sometimes they carried out raids on surrounding villages to get their food. They also stole and sold palm oil and engaged in petty trade when there was a lull in fighting on the frontline. The money raised in this way was remitted to the commanders.
Reintegrated children
Alongside the newly demobilised child soldiers from Liberia, there were many Sierra Leonean youngsters in Kenema district who put down their own guns when Sierra Leone's 10-year civil war ended in 2001. Several had been returned to their families and successfully reintegrated to their communities.
Hawa Konneh, 15, was trained to shoot and was given a gun by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel movement, but was never made to fight. She and her mother found themselves trapped in rebel territory for nine years.
Hawa, a beneficiary of Sierra Leone's child soldier reintegration programme, now attends a primary school in Kenema town. The school receives additional learning materials because of her.
"We give some support to the child [ex-combatants] but more so, we provide learning materials to the schools they attend," a UNICEF official told IRIN. The former child soldiers are also exempted from paying school fees.
Hawa and her mother, Fatou Konneh, were captured by RUF fighters who overran their village near Kailahun in eastern Sierra Leone soon after the war began in 1991.
Its entire population was rounded up and trained on the use of weapons. "But me and my mother and other women were not used to fight. We were told we would be called upon in the case of an emergency, but we never went to the battle field," she told IRIN.
They were not molested by RUF male fighters either. Hawa said she thought this was because some of her own relatives became RUF commanders "so we were protected".
Her father, Yankuba Konneh, who was separated from his family on the other side of the lines, said: "We started a new life upon their return. I felt it was my fault for failing to protect them so I took them back because we belong together."
He is taking a teaching course at the teachers training college in Kenema, while his wife is doing a computer course in the town.
Foday Fofana was one of the lucky ones. He was only 15 when he was captured by the RUF in 2001. He was forced to work for the rebels as a porter for three months, but managed to escape and shortly afterwards the RUF unit he was attached to demobilised.
Now aged 18 and studying in the final year of primary school, he said books, uniform, a school bag were his immediate needs. "I was very happy to be home and I am happy with my life today," Fofana told IRIN. "I would like to study hard and become a doctor," he said.
"I wept for the three months," Serray Kamara, Fofana's mother told IRIN. "I was depressed and confused, I longed for his return."
In some villages where Sierra Leonean child soldiers have returned, they have been made to undergo traditional cleansing rites to appease those they had wronged or the gods, a UNICEF official told IRIN.
In some of these ceremonies traditional healers sprinkle the children with concoctions believed to have cleansing powers. In some cases they are also prayed for in local churches after which they are welcomed into the community. "This increases the level of acceptance and the children feel more secure in the community," the UNICEF offical said.
However, he expressed concern about some instances where the host community insisted on former girl fighters undergoing female circumcision rites as part of the reintegration process.
Only eight percent demobilised
Relief workers said many girls were left out of Sierra Leone's disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme. They estimated that only eight percent of those associated with combatants had come forward.
Many girls had simply opted to stay with their abductors, who had become their sexual partners, but an increasing number were being abandoned by these de facto "husbands." A UNICEF programme designed to identify these girls was started in May. "A new phenomena is coming up where their "husbands" - the ex-fighters are abandoning the girls or sending them away," one UNICEF official said. "These cases are quite common in Kailahun district."
Kailahun was one of the first districts to be taken over by the RUF and one of the last to be accessed by aid agencies in 2002 when the war ended.
One of the biggest problem faced by those trying to reintegrate 7,000 child soldiers from the Sierra Leone conflict is waning donor interest in the rehabilitation projects set up to prevent these kids from going back to the bush with a gun: donors now see the country as having moved out of an emergency phase into one of development and reconstruction.
The Community Education Investment Programme (CEIP), an initiative designed to enable separated children return to school, is one victim of this phenomenon. UNICEF's Executive Director Carol Bellamy said in July that it was in danger of stalling because of a serious shortfall in funding.
Some US $1.4 million was needed immediately and a further $2.5 million would be required in the "near future" if the critical re-education and re-training programmes were to be completed, she said. The courses were less than halfway through, she added.
The Sierra Leone government was, meanwhile, also concerned about the growing problem of street children in Freetown and the other main towns. Many of these were believed to be former child soldiers and other children separated from their families during the civil war who had missed out on the reintegration programme.
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